A few judo experts don't agree with you and one has challenged Putin tow match!
Wittes is a LW hack and an advocate of hard power to confront Putin.
I'm sure Putin is no superhero as displayed for propaganda,but he's also a legitimate judo master
( whatever that is called)
fr: your link:
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Putin’s martial arts background is well accounted for, and he has long advocated for judo and other fighting techniques as a way of disciplining oneself. Whether he’s actually as fierce a fighter as he is made out to be is, of course, a different question, one that few writers other than Wittes have approached with much skepticism.
Putin’s biographers note that he started practicing judo and the Soviet combat technique Sambo as a teenager in St. Petersburg. In a 2001 interview with NPR, he described his lifelong love of both sports:
I started practicing this sport when I was 14, and as a matter of fact, what I did start engaging in was something called sambo, which is a Russian acronym for, quote, “self-defense without arms,” unquote, which is a Russian wrestling technique. And, after that, I joined a gym that was teaching judo. And I was what they call a master of sports. We have our sporting ranks, and the equivalent of the black belt I received when I was, I guess, 18, in judo. And all my adult life I have been practicing judo — I guess I can put it this way — and I do love the sport tremendously. And I think that there is more to it than just sport. I think it’s also a philosophy in a way, and I think it’s a philosophy that teaches one to treat one’s partner with respect. And I engage in this sport with pleasure and try to have regular practices still. Yes, still.
In recent years, Putin has received honorary martial arts awards, bestowed not so much in recognition of his actual skills as for his advocacy. In 2014, an international karate organization awarded him an eighth-degree black belt for his work promoting a form of full contact karate in Russia. The previous year, he was made a grandmaster of taekwondo by the World Taekwondo Federation after a visit to South Korea, even though he doesn’t practice the sport. The Independent noted at the time that he now ranks higher than martial arts expert and action movie star Chuck Norris.
